"OH! Noises & Visions! Departure into new affection & sound."
• Arthur Rimbaud


WRECK THIS MESS weekly thematic psychotopographies and auditory dérives: an aural nether of dub, atmosphere, odd planes of sound with various spoken word incursions. Through the white noise it rains surprise. Find some old playlists and articles here. Thanks to Henry Lowengard, the W-E-B-H-A-M-S-T-E-R-@-W-F-M-U-.-O-R-G.

1986: began radioactive life @ WFMU [91.1 FM] in East Orange, NJ [now located in Jersey City] as a fill-in "alternative" DJ fusing improbable segues & sounds into a new sonic soma based on synaptical exchanges … In 1985, I was encouraged to apply as a DJ by the inspiring DJ, the Vanilla Bean. He was a special guy. Frank Balesteri (The Vanilla Bean) was born February 2, 1960. He died without warning on 3 November 2001. He was a good friend of mine and a genius DJ who stretched the limits of radio and of a good time.
Stillmore r e m e m b r a n c e s was set up by musician and Bean friend R. Stevie Moore to remember the Bean by. Together they did some of the most madcapped radio shows I have ever heard especially their Larry & Mookie series. They also made movies, recordings, photos, stage performances.

At this site you will find many memories of the Vanilla Bean including mine. Here is a short excerpt:
Date: Fri, Nov 16, 2001
Subject: frankly about frank
For me, Frank, the Vanilla Bean, is not dead. Long ago my mind made an expressionistic holographic film of him to take with me for all time. The film is inspiring if open-ended, confusing, frustrating, all over the place, tentative, in your face and uncompromisingly complex and yet somehow vague. But the film also contains a lot of laughter and tense incidents relieved by comical bits. The Vanilla Bean is one of the two funniest people I have ever met.

1987: First regular show on Mondays, followed by Dave Shy Boy who still DJs at WFMU. This is when I started to earn a reputation as a strange cat who would sleep in the WFMU basement studio at night, spending hours and hourrs putting his show together as I explored the furthest, mustiest corners of the sizeable, even then, music collection.

Also edited 4 issues of Lowest Common Denominator. It became much more than a station program guide, featuring amazing musicology, wild parodies, madness, poetry, fiction and a gallery to the best emerging graphic artists at the time. I always thought it would be a great idea for someone [NOT ME!] to put out a best of and so I am glad that DJ Dave the Spazz decided to edite Best of LCD: The Art and Writing of WFMU, 256 pages including over 400 illustrations and publised by Princeton Architectural Press.


1988: migrated to Paris. WRECK THIS MESS christened on Anarchist station, Radio Libertaire [89.4 FM]. "Wreck" = causing the ruin of structures & expectation – iconoclasm. "This Mess" as in marketplace-warped inner ear. Contrary seamlessness – against time without pleasure, labor without meaning, talk without necessity – unclog aural-imaginal pathways.

1989-90: Co-hosted many dub mix extravaganzas with Panoupanou [Manu & Laurent] and guests like Black Sifichi, Brad Lay, Lorie, Jean-Luc, and others... Wine, Anglo-Franco talk of music and whatever. Then later retreating down the Montmartre hill to hang out in the Sartre Cafe [my name for it] because of its existential ambience -- it was almost always empty, the decorative details were at a bare minimum, hospitality was not even close to overbearing, no piped-in music, inhabited most often by a pair of characters wearing hundred year-old berets, talking to a small mutt. The barkeep, a quiet-storm sort of old lady with a gentle side had one beer, one vin blanc, one vin rouge, one soda and coffee is just that, coffee -- nothing else, no nuts, no snacks. And there we'd sit and talk heatedly about everything from politics to hair. For more see: Paris Scratch.
1991: returned to NYC & WFMU, leaving Laurent Diouf [1/2 PanouPanou] at the controls of WRECK THIS MESS-Paris every Tuesday 12.30 to 14.30. Extrapolated Libertaire’s WTM agenda — uninterrupted 3-hour sonic voyages. Segue as total orgasmic focus. Anonymity as signature, absence as obverse presence.

1996: Move to Amsterdam, DJ at Radio Patapoe [88.3 FM], a bedouin frequency, temporary audio zone, many locations including the Silo and the Kalenderpanden. Luddites for autonomous fun.

While Dada was born in 1916 and Muzak in 1934, Patapoe was born in 1973 when a little girl named Patty sang the tragic song about her lost dog Patapoe, accompanied by the Big Silver Bull Band. The radio station was born in the mid-1980s and was named after this song in a gesture halfway between kitch and Dada, halfway between the underground and nowhere. Patapoe is ubiquitous and obscure, meaningless and yet the very stimulus for a movement that traverses the entire globe. Here are the lyrics:
PATAPOE
Patapoe, Patapoe
Have you seen my darling Patapoe
Patapoe, Patapoe
Please come back, I don’t know what to do
Patapoe, Patapoe
Don’t you know that I love you
Patapoe, Patapoe
Please come back to me Patapoe

My mother gave me on my birthday little Patapoe
He was such a darling doggy and so clever too
Everyday he went out for a walk along the sea
How we played and how we ran, as happy as can be
Oh I don’t know what went wrong, today he disappeared

Refrain

Is there really no one who can tell me what to do
Who will bring me back my darling doggy Patapoe
Somewhere in this big wide world he is lonely without me
He is such a little baby he can’t live alone
He needs all my lovin and I need his lovin too

refrain

1999: Commence at autonome Radio 100 [RIP]. Sound art, mayhem, and sophisticated low-tech piracy. Winner of Gouden Kabouter (Golden Gnome) award for best NL radio station by the DJ Fanclub [WTM 1999-2004].

From Sing a Round For Ezra Pound & Other Ranters on the Radio by Bill Levy.
On Radio 100 everything is allowed, except spilling beer on the sound board. Everything. Sex. Drugs. New radio plays and mixes, world premieres of music composed by the broadcasters and others, all kinds of other music and information bringing advantage to the community. Live transmissions from demos making it all sound like a party, urging people to come and join. Sense and nonsense. Everything.... Although I consider my weekly program as, among other things, a performance and a column, broadcasting is something I do in public, not for a public. Then the program is my own, something I own. I play rock and roll because I want to. Nobody asked me to play rock and roll. And when I want to read poetry or give a speech, have a guest or live band, I do so. Radio is a medium without a proscenium and the pulpit I use to evangelize for a church of my own witness... The only way I can own my own ears is to produce something for them. Otherwise, one is merely a consumer, a slave to alien vibrations and orders. I especially enjoy the feeling of broadcasting alone from the studio. The disembodied voice.... It's like being at once a stylite and a populist. The deliberate act of the indvidual for the sake of a solidarity must also, always and inevitably, be an act of solidarity.

2001-??: Radio Patapoe managed to survive attacks on free [non-commercial] radio in the period of 2003-2004 as enacted by a neo-conservative government. Many, like Radio 100, vanished. Meanwhile, after the dust settled and the ether turned out NOT to be the capitalist playground many assumed, pirates and free stations began to pop up again like magic mushrooms in a dark forest. Patapoe is a stable fable. Live streaming.